Our day started at the Goodge Street tube stop (no, that is not a bodily orafice). We took the northern line south three stops to Charing Cross, and jumped lines to the Bakerloo for four stops, and we had arrived at Elephant and Castle in the borough of Southwark. We had been warned that it was a questionable area. The reality was far more shocking. Immediately upon exiting the tube, we were approached by a man with a bloody face (no, not that kind of bloody, but a gruesomely literal BLOODY face) asking repeatedly for help. After evading what seemed like a potential mugging (considering that the “victim” didn’t ask the nearby policeman for help) we set off through Elephant and Castle.
A walk through the painfully modern local University ensued. Being a college area there were many take-out and ethnic restaurants. In fact, the area seemed to be predominately lower class, dominated by Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Their culture was further depicted by the murals painted in the subway tunnels (which are walking tunnels, not tubes). We continued our walk into nearby Lambeth, where we found a large obelisk dedicated to King George. Though hesitant to approach and take pictures of the monument as there were several tramps hanging about, we eventually overcame our apprehension. On nearing the structure we were immediately greeted by the bare bum of a homeless man, having just unloaded on said monument. Luckily, he didn’t make it into any of our pictures, though the memory will be burned into our traumatized memories forever.
After this troubling experience we decided that if we didn’t find anything nice within a block, we were returning to central London. Fortunately we stumbled upon a beautiful Tibetan Peace Garden, ironically adjacent to the Imperial War Museum. The center was dominated by a large metal Mandala design. However, the main attraction was off to the side. A pillar quoating the XIV Dalai Lama in four languages (Tibetan, English, Chinese, and Hindi) read as follows:
“We human beings are passing through a crucial period in our development. Conflict and mistrust have plagued the past century which has brought immeasurable human suffering and environmental destruction. It is in the interest of all of us on this planet that we make a joint effort to turn the next century into an era of peace and harmony. May this Peace Garden become a monument to the courage of the Tibetan people and their commitment to peace. May it remain as a symbol to remind us that human survival depends on living in harmony and on always choosing the path of non-violence in resolving our differences.” -May 13, 1999
Considering its location in a diverse community it is especially prominent. The message conveyed by the garden gives hope to the minorities who experience discrimination, not just in London, but throughout the world.
Leaving the gorgeous garden and its Ice Age Tree Path (we’re not sure either), we entered the Imperial War Museum. Located in the building that once housed Bethlem Hospital, it is now a wide open space filled with various instruments of destruction. We chose to explore the morbid and depressing Holocaust Exhibit, which was appropriately desplayed in an age restricted corridor. Though tastefully done it left us feeling rather sad. We left. Returning to the tube station in an attempt to figure out why the stop got its name, we asked a security person whose response was “That’s just its name”. The only clue was a pub located next to the station called The Elephant and Castle. The area was, in fact, named FOR said pub, but admittedly we didn’t know this at the time. We did however make up a highly amusing story to explain the name that we had only ever heard of in Harry Potter. Ask us about it later.
Our return was made on the number 68 bus to Russell Square, and we continued on foot to our hotel, where we collapsed in heaps of exhaustion on our beds and had to be pried off our beds with a shoe horn in time for discussion. Unfortunately, our designated camera had forgotten its memory card reader in its laptop case, so our pictures are currently marooned on said camera. They’ll come up sometime on Monday or Tuesday.
